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NAS on a grand scale

Roll your own NAS cluster Sometimes it's difficult to find a good out-of-the-box network-attached storage (NAS) clustering solution. That's the situation that Todd Moore from Dynamic Graphics Group found himself in. "We needed a cluster of NAS servers that could share with CIFS, NFS and HTTP, provide both availability and scalability and would integrate with our legacy applications," says Moore. He wasn't satisfied with available out-of-the-box products, so his team rolled their own, leveraging PolyServe's Matrix Server, a SAN file system. Dynamic Graphics' solution consists of a four-node Linux cluster sharing 11TB of StorageTek storage area network (SAN) storage with Matrix Server. Two nodes act as NAS servers using open-source Samba software, while another serves a legacy application. The last is a dedicated backup and administration host. Matrix Server allows applications on all four hosts to see the same storage at the same time--at SAN speeds--and share it with a variety of protocols. At first, Moore had reservations about...